My friend and I made wishes on coffee beans and planted them – buried them, actually. We gave our wishes to the earth, hers into hallowed ground and mine in potted jasmine. We took photos of each other first, before we parted, each holding our kalpa-beans, and exchanged promises to check on each other on the dates by which we had decided our wishes would be granted. We were playing with the universe. On the morning on which we’d made this pact of aspiration, I had just made manifest a cherished dream of mine. And so, slaked of desire, I went for the whimsical. Perhaps I wasn’t playing with the universe so much as teasing it, saying: “I will ask for the thing I cannot have, and you will withhold it from me, or you will humble me by giving it to me. I will either be sanctimonious or I’ll be sweetly surprised. I don’t mind either.”
I set a short deadline, while my friend – more sincere than I in her entreaty – set a realistic one. And I waited. No, I didn’t. That’s a lie. I just watched. Today, on the day I write this, she will reach out to me with a question. And my answer is ready: “Nothing.”
Nothing granted, everything ventured. It is sanctimonious that I am today.
What I did in those weeks of watching was to watch myself as much as I watched what transpired, the things that held tendrils of possibility that I would indeed be humbled by the universe’s willingness to listen. I watched myself considering the relationship between desire and actualisation. And I watched myself wanting – this is true. And I allowed for and enjoyed the surprises that visited me, but without pausing to ask if they were correlated to a wish made on a coffee bean in a convoluted way – by naming something so deeply desired but already assumed to be unviable.
Here is the secret of why I am not sad, not on this un-disappointing deadline day and not even on the nights when I trace and retrace the question of how I became this person who writes so often of terror but so little of love. It is because it takes not much for me to feel fulfilled. I wasn’t always like this, but I learned (in the only, never easy, way that one can learn these things). I don’t think I can say it better than these lines from a story I wrote once: “So I began to adore simply, not loudly, and always in the awareness that those like me must live like flowering trees. We are who we are, prosperously or otherwise. And our lives are crowned, now and then, with moments of exaltation—each held and breathed in deeply, and then let go.”
I neglected to mention – those were roasted coffee beans. They won’t sprout. The exercise of placing them into earth was only to say, “Even against all contrary evidence, I choose to believe. I choose to ask again, even if I’ve been denied before.”We already chose happiness long ago; so every ritual that reminds us is a pleasure.
Sharanya Manivannan
Twitter@ranyamanivannan
The Chennai-based author writes poetry, fiction and more